"They are happy to be where they are, and would not be happy to be where we are."

Why stop there? Is 39 years behind bars for an innocent less ridiculous than killing them?

Both are ridiculous, but only one can be somewhat rectified. Death is pretty final most of the time. (Some folks technically die, but are revived).

Is there any sensible study on those system's energy consumption?

Given that public clouds are ruthlessly optimized for efficiency and they don't have to perform trustless proof of anything, it's virtually certain that decentralized storage is less efficient in every way than centralized.

What does "virtually certain" mean here anyway? And on what scale are you imagining things?

Let's say the entirety of YouTube was decentralized in a way that every internet connected device plugged in to the wall starts sharing watched content to other viewers who want to watch that content. If it's your neighbor, they'll download it straight from you, via the closest router/hub. Suddenly the company's hosting is more providing a "core archive" of data, and every user becomes a edge node of that content. Internet providers can, if they chose, pre-share content they think will be popular, in order to speed up their own infrastructure, and so on.

I'm not saying this is bullet proof or anything, I just think you're too quick to dismiss it without really saying why you think it's impossible (or "virtually certain").

Youtube (and most other streaming services) is already decentralized into thousands of edge caches. Decentralizing it further doesn't make much sense because the network cost is about the same if individual homes or their nearest ISP DC has the cache.

Most home networks are wireless only at this point which is pretty bad for throughput, latency, and reliability if serving other homes. Maybe ISPs could start building some storage and IPFS into modems? I think handling the metadata of a p2p system might still be too costly. Imagine every neighborhood having to run a torrent tracker for every media file produced in the last ~year.

I love P2P and I have been into it since the Napster days but it isn't feasible any more. The value of a random Internet device is actually negative because the complexity of wrangling it outweighs what little resources it could contribute. (See Spotify and Joost for examples.)

I assume all these decentralized storage systems are datacenter-based so I'm comparing random Chinese datacenters vs. FAANG datacenters.

https://github.com/ranger/ranger nobody? And as others have pointed out, fasd and fzf of course.

Ah. I never replied to the e-mails sent out by my employer about registering for a training in phishing detection. I just assumed those e-mails were phishing e-mails.

I assume that so many official emails from my employer are phishing.. it's a mess.

*It's obviously much easier to change the random employee than it is to change the central agent.